“Ask the Atheist” was good – 'til it died. The problem seemed to be that only a couple of 'em really cared.
I gave up on the Newsstand, too. The thread about Bush’s embellishments just annoyed me with the way they kept saying, “Yeah, but Gore is worse!” Even when I pointed out what a poor debate tactic that was, they just turned around and did it again. 
I didn’t even get as far as you guys did.
I found this Mr. Anderson cat to simply be rude to me. He put words in my mouth on three occassions, did not apologize when called on it, and the overall hostility he showed me was one of two reasons I stopped posting there.
The other was the “if abortion should be illegal, what is the penalty” thread. ZooMom (yes, the person who showed up here and took on Gaudere) was giving me the whole, “you’re killing a baby” crap. I responded with what i thought was a simple agree-to-disagree statement of “I just don’t feel that a fetus, while alive, should have the same rights as the fully-formed human without whom the fetus cannot exist anyway,” and she comes back with “But you’re killing a baby” yet AGAIN.
Sorry… If I want to have people be abusive to me or ignore my points, I can go to Usenet…
No disrespect meant to a majority of the folks there, of course, especially the sites moderators…
Yer pal,
Satan
*I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
Six months, two weeks, 13 hours, 10 minutes and 57 seconds.
7901 cigarettes not smoked, saving $987.74.
Extra life with Drain Bead: 3 weeks, 6 days, 10 hours, 25 minutes.
I slept with a REPUBLICAN moderator!*
Well, I guess we should have learned from past experience…
What, David? That there are people who choose not to think among any group? Taken as a whole, I find the Pizza People to be a warm and caring group, unafraid to ask hard questions and to examine them – while holding fast to a faith that they find acceptable, even though you as a skeptic find inadequate evidence to agree.
There are some people there who just plain choose to argue. There are others who debate from a sincere stance.
And there are a few for whom it is a MPSIMS style community.
I don’t see bashing going on often if at all. That Mike M. argues with you basing his views on his worldview is hardly unacceptable – what, precisely, do you do here? I agree that mythbuster can be a bit annoying, but that is like condemning SDMB on the basis of {insert name of former poster and of Platonic dialogue here}.
It sounds to me like they’ve learned much the same lessons as we did from the New Years Massacre. And I’m pleased to be part of both boards.
Poly said:
Unfortunately, what I saw was that the latter group was drowned out by the former. I am not trying to condemn everybody there, and hope it didn’t come across that way. But when a few go to such great lengths to act in a certain way, well, you know what they say about a bad apple.
Yes, there are. And I had very little interaction with them (even less than my interaction with the MPSIMS folks around here 
). If that’s what somebody is looking for, then they will obviously have a different experience than I had.
But that isn’t why you invited us there. It isn’t why most of us went there. You invited us over to discuss creation/evolution. It went okay for a while. Then the trolls started coming out of the woodwork and the non-trolls didn’t do much (if anything) to help the situation.
I’m not talking about arguing based on a given set of worldviews. I’m talking about arguing honestly. I pointed to several situations above where I felt that was not going on (for example, in the thread about Bush where he kept trying to divert attention from the subject at hand). Do some people do that here? Hell, yes! But they also get jumped on by the mass of others who recognize it. It seems reversed over there – at least in some situations.
A bit annoying? He is a troll and nothing else. If we had a troll like that around here, half the board would be kicking his ass. I didn’t see that happening there? Why? Maybe because he is espousing the viewpoint held by most of the folks there? I dunno for sure. But if I saw somebody like that here, even if he was espousing the viewpoints I hold, I’d be one of the people telling him to quit acting like a troll.
To me, it looked very much like a reg created a bogus name just to troll around those discussions. I can’t prove it. I have no idea who it might be. I could be wrong. But that’s what it looked like to me.
And I saw that you were having some good conversations with them. That’s great, and I’m glad to see it. But the types of conversations that you were having are not the type that I or Satan or most of the other folks from here would have. I would never criticize you for enjoying something like that, and they did seem like they would be interesting if I were in your shoes (if I were, for example, Christian 
). But, as I said, that’s not why the majority of us went over there.
Your last sentence, reiterated, is most true. And at the time I asked 'Gator’s OK (to assure it was clear to management there what was up, so that there was no repeat of the “invasion” BS) and issued the invitation, it appeared that Mr. Anderson and a couple of others wanted a serious debate – in more depth than my rather limited background in evolutionary biology allowed. In short, that they wanted to hear the evolutionist argument and discuss the alternatives in a forum where both sides could be made clear without anti-creationist rhetoric on the one side and appeals to religious views (a la ICR) on the other. And I accepted the good intentions which Mr. Anderson seemed to be showing in asking for that.
As it turned out, some interesting cross-fertilization happened; there was no war, though a few people felt less than happy about the results (me included, for a spell). And I misunderstood your post as a condemnation of the Parlor as a bigoted/doctrinaire LBMB-lite – which it is emphatically not, though its Christian focus does give it a specific flavor. So my apologies for reacting negatively to your earlier post, and thanks for clearing up what you were saying in the latter one.
No prob.
I will say that the moderation there is significantly better than at LBMB. At no time did I ever worry that I was going to be censored, have threads mysteriously disappear, or the like – as often happened at LBMB.
Because this is a board dedicated to ‘fighting ignorance’ I’ll state that the user mythbuster is a unique user, using a unique email address. The IP’s he posts from are unique to him, (based on a random sample of 6 of 26 posts).
As to troll-like behavior, I think that is a matter of personal opinion. A poster labeled a troll here might not be so labeled elsewhere. And someone who might be a respected poster here, might come off like a troll elsewhere.
The genus of Poly’s request was to one or two people that he was debating on the subject of CvE. Something that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since the Parlor opened.
Once the invitation was made, the forum had a huge jump in activity. I think that was instructive. I did learn somethings. In the end, CvE isn’t and hasn’t been a big issue with me. I would also bet that the majority of the userbase at the Parlor doesn’t see CvE as a big issue either.
On the other topics, Poly’s idea of differing worldviews is very salient. Almost to the point of speaking different languages. Something very clear to us, is somewhat unclear to some of you, and visa-versa. Perhaps we can get a translator?
Peace.
You rang?
LOL Poly…I think you, myself, and Frosty could translate.
Navigator said:
Thank you for checking that. I do wonder a bit how you checked his IP versus the IPs of all other users to find out that it was “unique,” but I still thank you for the effort.
In some cases, yes. But in this case, no, I disagree. He was a troll pretty much no matter how you define it. He contributed nothing, and just tried to send things off on tangents.
And that’s fine. In the beginning, there was some decent discussion. But then the trolls got active and it just went downhill.
I don’t think there’s a translator in the world (sorry, Poly, not even you) who can act as a go-between for these worldviews. When I point to a man who holds himself out as a leader of the Christian community and note that he lies through his teeth, and folks on your board just shrug and say “he’s human, he’ll repent” as if his lies don’t matter, I have a really big problem with that. I don’t know how to even have a discussion with people like that. I feel like it would be more productive to talk to my wall, instead. (The same can be said about the several other examples I gave earlier.) It’s not just that we’re talking in different languages, but in different planes of reality.
the wonders of vBulletin, I trust whoever wrote the code, makes sure it does what it says…
I could be wrong though…
Peace.
hands David a rootbeer…
David B “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” have you ever lied? Why do you hold christans to a diffrent standard than one you would put for yourself? After all we are all human and unless you claim that all morality springs from saying your a christan I don’t see what your getting at.
Asmodean wrote:
Because a heck of a lot of Christians consider themselves to be on a “higher” moral plane than all those heathenous obviously-amoral-and-Satan-worshipping non-Christians out there. So we call 'em out on it from time to time.
I would hold Christians to a higher standard in one case. When they put forth the impression that they speak the word of God, or with the authority of the Lord Jesus, I would hold them to a divine standard. I find that very little Internet content reaches that standard. I certainly try to avoid giving the impression that my own words have such authority.
Tris
Tris – you’re right about internet discussions, but I was talking about leaders of the “religious right” who seemed to have no problem lying through their teeth whenever it suited them.
Unfortunately, Asmodean seems to be of the same attitude that I found so disgusting over at LBMB2: It’s okay for them to lie.
But I can’t say the level of debate on “Order Here First” is now or ever was particularly high. It started with people like CreationFreak mentally masturbating over how one day evolution will end up in the dustbin of history, and it’s ended up being a discussion with trolls like mythbuster and Veutron. Even Roblynn should be criticised here, since she seems to be keeping her finger in. Roblynn, in typical creationist fashion, presents strongly-worded arguments but refuses to acknowledge that people have presented counterarguments- just like CreationFreak, mythbuster, and Veutron.
Let me ask you this: if I go to the appropriate forum at the Pizza Parlor and ask them to explain to me, in detail, the meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice, will I get an intelligent answer, or will I be treated to a recitation of John 3:16? The folks on LBMB didn’t seem to even comprehend the concept of thinking about Christianity beyond the ad copy. Are folks on the Pizza Parlor any different? Everything I have seen thus far indicates that they aren’t.
-Ben
Nonetheless, those good intentions turned out to be entirely false. Mr. Anderson at no point asked questions to clarify his understanding of evolution- instead, he shot off arguments about how evolution is wrong, and mused over relative-truth schemes that would lower the bar low enough for creationism to pass itself off as true.
David, you said that for a while the conversation on PP went ok. When? Which poster there do you feel was interested in a serious conversation? Which one do you feel was not a troll?
-Ben
Umm… ya pulled a Lib, Rob is a guy.
Que sera sera…
OMYJOD! All of you speak so eloquently…I don’t have a chance here, except to say that I get so much out of your (our)discussion…THANK YOU! I’m more of a lurker, but also a student. It may be boring for you at this point, but I love watching it all pan out!
